IT360 Show April 30 - May 2, 2007

[Colin McGregor]

--- John Van Ostrand <john-Da48MpWaEp0CzWx7n4ubxQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 12:11 -0500, Paul Mora wrote:
> > All you need to do to "ensure attendance" is to
> have interesting
> > presentations.  You'll get the people walking
> around the show floor.
> > I agree that 10X10' is not much space to work
> though.

I was at the GTALug meeting last evening (which had
Evan Leibovitch of CLUE in attendance), and I have
been talking to the show organizers. A few things that
are getting kicked around include:

- Arranging to have multiple (well, 2+) booths beside
each other, such as possibly GTALug and CLUE, so that
in effect we might be talking a 10' x 20' booth shared
by 2 groups (or some other multiple of 10' x 10').
This is still a bit up in the air (both CLUE and the
show organizers are willing to consider this idea, but
... don't hold your breath...).

- As happened last year the show has offered us a room
in the evening. Last year we used the room offered to
us for the regular NewTLUG meeting, which I gather
made a very favourable impression on the show
organizers. Assuming we can do everything with just
standard AV equipment (i.e.: if we want Internet
access there will be a charge to us) the doing some
sort of presentation(s) in the evening would be
trivial to arrange.

- Evan is involved in helping set-up a VOIP program
track for the show (thus I assume the Asterisk people
and their involvement).

- An idea was kicked around about possibly taking last
year's NewTLUG presentation and recycling it for this
year's show as part of the (paid) program track...

I would be nervous about doing in-booth presentations
with anything less than a 20' x 20' booth. While 2
groups uniting for a bigger booth is very possible, I
very much doubt we will get to 4 groups together,
Further we would need the show organizers to sign off.
Finally not only would we need groups beside each
other we would need all four groups to agree to give
up some of their space to a presentation area... Far
too easy for any of these items to derail the
process...

In other words, doing an evening presentation is very
possible, on the show floor, no...

> Well, to fill a 10x10 it might do, but think of the
> effect of clogging
> an aisle with people who are interested in hearing a
> demo. This can only
> be had with scheduled presentations. Put it on a
> sign outside the booth
> and on the handouts and have the booth staff promote
> it. That's the
> advertising that I meant.
> 
> Last year there were show-floor presentation time
> available that Net
> Direct helped to fill. I recommend you keep in
> contact with Janice (the
> IT World rep) and make her aware that you have some
> presentations
> available if she needs them in a pinch. 
> 
> There may be other opportunities too. The Toronto
> Asterisk User Group
> was asked to create a "mini" asterisk conference for
> the show. I think
> IT360 is working harder than ever to attract
> attendees and exhibitors.
> Maybe there's an opportunity to do something similar
> with TLUG.
> Brainstorming with Janice may make that happen.

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